Fighting Dharma

Gravel bikes are safety bicycles; modern, multi-use, hybrid. Sheldon Brown did not have an entry for gravel bike in the 2008 version of his Bicycle Glossary. (His blog is maintained, and the site is updated, with many modern contributions from John Allen and other friends of cycling). René Herse Cycles (formerly Compass Cycles) and Cycling …

A lean bread is flour, water, yeast and salt. Sandwich bread is enriched with sugar or milk. Milk has fats and sugars, in solution. Sugar makes the dough more extensible, which helps the dough to flow and rise. However, sugar or milk change the crust and crumb. Pure wheat white flour (rye or other grain …

Bread made with rye flour was made when rye grew in northern climates and wheat did not. Rye has less protein and does not produce enough gluten to rise like a leavened wheat bread. Rye loaves are a specialty product for commercial bakers. There are retail/craft/home formulas for a rustic style with rye flour, e.g. …

Multigrain Multigrain means a blend of bread flour and whole wheat, or white flour with another flour. A basic bake program will work where the dough has 50% bread flour, or more. At 50% bread flour, recipes may suggest a whole wheat program, or a machine’s multigrain program. “Standard” bread machine recipes have to be …

Bread machine recipes have to be customized for machines. I stopped trusting “standard” recipes. I adapt recipes, mainly from the Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook (“BLBMC”). I worked out my approach to yeast and low sodium in baking in a Panasonic SD-YD250 for medium (1.5 lb.) loaves June, July and August, 2018. BLBMC recipes did …

The review of the Zojirushi Virtuoso BB-PAC20 bread machine at: Breadmakers.com Kitchenstory.com describe and illustrate this machine. It is a 2016 machine, superseded in the product line by the Virtuoso Plus. I found a refurbished machine in an online store. It is a large, heavy, stable machine. It is quiet, compared to other machines I …

I began to chart recipes in tables when I realized that recipes from sources like the Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook (2000) did not work in a Panasonic SD-YD250 machine. Each manufacturer has its own set of programs for its machines. Standard recipes fail, predictably, in some devices. Hidden rows and columns hold data such …

An Instant Pot is not a traditional slow cooker (“TSC”). The TSC has two cooking settings: low and high. Recipes for TSCs assume: the heat is delivered by the element around the lower vertical sides of a ceramic crock; food near the element may cook faster or even reach a sauté/fry/burn temperature; fluid near the …